Trivia / John Mellencamp

• Acclaimed Flop: Human Wheels was a comparatively slow seller, but is one of John's most critically acclaimed albums.
• Black Sheep Hit: "What Say You", his 2004 duet with Travis Tritt, was his only major crossover to Country Music. He later tried again with "Our Country" thanks to its use in commercials, but it wasn't as successful.
• Creator Backlash:
  • He hates having been renamed Johnny Cougar at the start of his career, since his manager made the decision without consulting him, and besides he'd never actually been called "Johnny" in his whole life up to that point. He tolerated the John Cougar and John Cougar Mellencamp variations, but once he felt he had enough clout and recognition, he just started going by his real name.
  • He's also not a big fan of his early albums, flat out calling the songs "awful".
• Short Run in Peru: A bizarre case of this reviving someone's career. After his 1976 debut album Chestnut Street Incident flopped, MCA refused to release his second album, 1978's A Biography, in the US. It still got issued in the UK and Australia by Riva Records, a label owned by Rod Stewart's manager Billy Gaff, and the single pulled from it, "I Need a Lover", became a Top 10 hit in Australia. Building on that momentum, Riva secured a distribution deal with PolyGram in the US, issued "I Need a Lover" in 1979, and saw it become his Breakthrough Hit there, hitting the Top 30 in Billboard. Instead of just re-releasing A Biography, though, Riva added the song to his third album John Cougar. A Biography didn't get a US release until 2005 (as part of a remaster series of his early albums).
• What Could Have Been: Mellencamp says that he was offered the role of J.D. in Thelma & Louise and claims to have been told that the role was written for him. But he declined the role because he didn't want to take his shirt off on film, so the part went to Brad Pitt instead.